“I don’t ever want to dream too small,” confides Tabitha Meeks, 90 minutes into a conversation where the Zoom link has already dropped at least a couple of times. Her patience is commendable, and her disposition sunny. Indeed, the sun seems to radiate through every gap in the curtains as she sits comfortably on a sofa in her Nashville home, in contrast to the grey brutalism framing me on the other end of the call.
You wish you could reach out and grab some of it—that sun-bleached optimism—and drag it back some 4,000 miles across the Atlantic. Of course, you can if you buy her debut album or tap the right button on Spotify. “I’m not always the happy person you see when I’m performing,” smiles Meeks. “I have days when I am low energy, like everyone else. I can’t be like that all the time, but I certainly try my best. Positivity is important to me.”
If you’ve listened to her debut album, Can’t a Girl Dream?, you’ll know from the self-penned, intoxicating lyrics in songs like “Life of the Party: that Meeks doesn’t “…like to go on hikes”, and isn’t “…the cool girl with the boots who only eats organic fruits.” She also freely admits to avoiding the gym because she “…hates sweating quite a lot.” Yet none of these comic, everyday struggles can keep her down; the song builds to a rallying cry for living your best life: “And I’m not where I thought I’d be, but I’m living out all my dreams. Might be broke and out of luck, but I feel like a million bucks.”
Tabitha Meeks is vintage “Girl Power” in a 1960s Nancy Sinatra dress and white vinyl boots. It may seem retro, but really, it’s brand-new/second-hand—a merging of the old and the new. She sings about Sex and the City and spending “seven dollars on a latte” while being backed by a vintage Mellotron, even tracking her vocals in the studio hallway in a nod to pioneering mid-century producers like Joe Meek. “But we need to be really careful not just to imitate,” Meeks cautions. “We don’t want it to get cheesy. It has to still feel real and ‘today.’
“But you know, so much of today’s sound is cookie-cutter. You’ve got to fit into a box and be easily labelled so that people can understand what you’re doing.”
Meeks arrived in Nashville six years ago with a folk band called the Mona Lisa Tribe, a dream, unrestrained optimism, and not much else. The band quickly broke up. “Very early, I knew I wanted to do this really seriously, whereas most of the others just wanted to do it more as a side thing. But the split was all amicable, and we’re all still friends,” Meeks notes, having thrown herself into the familiar stream of free Music City gigs while building a network and establishing herself.
“What you see as a tourist in Nashville isn’t the music industry,” she explains. “All those bars with three stages in each and musicians working on four-hour shifts between them—I’ve done it. It’s such a grind. No one from the industry goes there. You have to go to the songwriting rounds, write with people, and network your butt off. It’s such a writer’s town.
“It’s real boots-on-the-ground stuff at first—but everyone arrives here in the same position. Nobody arrives knowing anybody. You just need to find your people,” adds Meeks.
Finding her sound took time. In a town fixated on country music, Tabitha Meeks’ early material mirrored the whispered, breathy jazz of Norah Jones. Songs like “Ragdoll” didn’t move the needle, and a beautifully haunting seasonal track, “Christmas with You”, also failed to dent the streaming algorithms—though it did feature in the closing scene of the 2023 Hallmark movie, Catch Me If You Claus. “No, it didn’t make me rich,” she laughs.
A gradual pivot toward retro pop followed. As a musical genre, Meeks defines it as “matching today’s pop with stuff that was popular 50 or 60 years ago, without becoming a pastiche. The theme is about fun, feeling good, and not taking life too seriously. It’s about creating a little escape for people.” This is something that Meeks doubles down on in her energetic live performances and 1960s-inspired stage outfits.
Still, success was a slow burn, with many of these later releases also failing to land. She admits to struggling to get to grips with the vagaries of social media algorithms and the hooks that can make a song blow up. “It can be so frustrating,” she levels. “You plant all these seeds, and nothing happens for years. It can be so slow. You can release a song, and literally nobody cares.
“But you can’t dwell on it. You just need to plant more in the hope that something lands at some point down the line. Patience is the key. You have to be so, so patient.”
Right on cue, her cute dog, Mozart, jumps into the shot, chewing on a soft toy that emits an intermittent, high-pitched squeak. I can barely hear it, but through laughter, Meeks apologizes profusely. Naming her dog after a classical maestro feels perfectly fitting for a lifelong pianist, hinting at the deep musical roots beneath her pop exterior.
Meeks—Tabs to her friends—has been playing the piano since she was a kid growing up in a “pretty conservative” Christian family near Orlando, Florida. “We didn’t listen to a ton of pop music, but there were plenty of oldies my parents introduced me to,” she says. “You know, people like Carole King, Jim Croce, and Aretha Franklin. I remember dancing around to Lesley Gore. At the time, the music is just there. You don’t really think about how it influences you until later, but, you know, I did have my Avril Lavigne phase as a teenager, too!
“I’ve always played a lot of piano, so classical music has always been part of my influence. Musical theatre as well. I love to feel like a performer as well as an artist.”
Much of her time these days is spent on the road, playing various gigs up and down the country. That love for performance leads her to take her unique sound to Wilmington, Delaware; Wooster, Ohio; Pittsburgh; and Auburn, Alabama. Does it ever become a slog to be perpetually on the road? Particularly when her performance relies so much on her sunny, Day-Glo brand of optimism. “It can be hard,” admits Meeks. “Being away from home definitely can be, but I work on being mindful that I’m lucky enough to do music for a living. That’s so cool and rare and fun. I’m so appreciative of that.”
Much of the drive behind these regular gigs has been in response to the sudden surge in her music’s popularity over the past 18 months. “I just felt the need to go out there and meet the people who have been listening to it [online]. They can now see it live and get the human experience. I love connecting with the audience.
“You know, I’m not burnt out on my songs yet. I’m still in the new phase of my music. A new energy comes with each show. I get to look out and see people smiling and sometimes singing along. That gives me so much energy.”
When Tabitha Meeks references the “audience singing along,” her eyes widen. You can sense how much it means to have the words that she’s written in quiet anonymity, sometimes years before, suddenly land and present themselves on the lips of a crowd of strangers. At this point, I tell her that “Ragdoll”—the song that never did “anything”—is one of my favorites.
She quietly gives me a little impromptu rendition of the song’s chorus: “Hold me close to your heart / When I’m falling apart / Like a little ragdoll.”
“It’s really great that you like ‘Ragdoll.’ I’ve not performed it in years. It’s so cool to have released something four or five years ago, and there you are 4,000 miles away listening to it and appreciating it.”
Yet, this international connection might never have happened without a chance encounter four years ago at the Analog, a performance venue inside Nashville’s Hutton Hotel. UK pop star Pixie Lott happened to be staying at the hotel and caught Meeks’ set.
“To be honest, at the time I didn’t know how big she was in Europe,” Meeks laughs. “We ended up going out and partying in Nashville for a night. The next day, we wrote a song, and then she was gone. But we stayed friends online.”
That song was the catchy, festive track “Ready for Christmas” (co-written and performed with Ryan Corn). When it was released independently in 2023, it failed to make an impression. “Nobody cared,” shrugs Meeks. “It just did nothing at all.” However, a year later, the internet weaved its magic. The song suddenly exploded, generating over a million reels on Instagram and TikTok.
“I still don’t know how. I guess it’s a searchable title and a catchy song,” she says. “But once you get that momentum, the Spotify algorithms kick in and push you into radio algorithms and other stuff. It’s really hard to figure out how to break through and what will land. I released like 20 songs before that one without anything happening at all.”
The momentum didn’t stop there. In late 2025, a pregnant Pixie Lott reached out to Tabitha Meeks again via video call to collaborate on a new track. Following this exchange, the song “First Christmas” was born—a heartfelt, piano-led ballad celebrating new parenthood and the magic of Christmas with a newborn. With Lott on vocals, the Meeks-penned song bypassed the slow-burn phase to zero in on an impressive 50 million streams on Spotify.
Buoyed by this newfound success, “Ready for Christmas” was re-released as a collaboration with the British artist. “I was so delighted she was willing to do that. It was so random!” reveals Meeks. It led to Lott inviting her to perform at a Christmas-themed, one-off show at London’s atmospheric Union Chapel, where the pair duetted on the up-tempo, crackling-fires, mistletoe, and twinkling-lights-enthused hit. “It was such a whirlwind. I was thrilled to be asked and just loved every minute of it.
“I guess, ‘You might call it luck, I call it destiny,’” smiles Meeks as she quotes one of her own song lyrics. “But you’ve got to put yourself out there. If I’d just stayed in my hometown, none of this would have happened.”
That destiny forms the backbone of Can’t a Girl Dream? released in early 2026. The ten-track playlist is a technicolor cocktail of female empowerment, evoking cool shades and 3:00 PM Margaritas. Beneath the up-tempo gloss of tracks like “Cherry on Top” lies a clear mission statement, perfectly encapsulated in the album’s opening anthem, “Girl of the Hour”: “Taking back my power / Find the sweet in the sour / Stop and smell every flower / I’m the Girl of the Hour.”
“[Can’t a Girl Dream?] a is authentic to who I am,” Meeks reflects as our time winds down. “The world is so chaotic right now, and news algorithms constantly feed us negativity. My message is just: hey, keep dreaming, keep being positive.
“Maybe the best could actually happen!”